For our next trick, we're going to finally start binding the little rascal.
Jim_H mentioned somewhere back in this thread that in his experience it was easier to apply the binding one layer at a time. As it works out, he's both right and wrong. Y'all can probably disregard how the thread started, with making a multi-layer binding up front. I couldn't get that to work here. What happens is the binding ends up too thick, then it doesn't want to bend even after heating it up. If you do get it to bend, the laminations want to seperate, which is NFG. I imagine if you were doing something thinner, you might get away with that method, but that's not what we're doing here.
Picture taking a stack of paper sheets and trying to wrap them around a circular tube with the ends of the paper stack glued. The gradually increasing diameter of the stack means the outer pieces have to be longer than the inner pieces. If the paper were either stretchy or compressible, you might wrestle it into shape, but they're not. Same thing happens with the binding. The outer layers need to stretch or the inner layers need to compress, and they really don't want to do either of those things because of the material's physical properties and the fact that they're fastened together along their length. Naturally, the first things to go are the glue joints, but there are other problems. Net result: a hopeless mess that will never work.
So, that stack of binding I originally made looks like waste. But, I did find a use for some of it after all.
When you want to make a thicker multi-layer binding, you need a deep channel. If you want to do it one layer at a time, no matter what thickness you start with you're going to have trouble holding it tight against the body while you tape it in place and wait for the glue to set. The tape is going to be pushing at an angle, while the force you want to apply needs to be perpendicular to the attached/glued side.
So, I got out a PVC tube cutting tool, and started making a pile of little 1/4" to 1/2" spacer blocks out of the previously built-up binding. As you can see, many pieces separated at the lamination, but that was ok. As things progressed and the installed binding layers stacked up, the spacer blocks would need to get thinner anyway...
Next step is actually glueing on the first strip. For this stage, I used something called "
Weld-On #16", which is basically a combination of really nice solvents like Methyl Ethyl Ketone and Methylene Chloride mixed with some acrylic monomers to form a goop similar to Testor's Model Cement, for those of you who used to build plastic models as a kid. No Toluene, though, so you can't get high off it; you can only get cancer. At least, that's what California thinks, so try to avoid injecting 50cc of it directly into your bloodstream every 15 minutes for 10 days like they do to lab rats to prove that it's toxic.
Basically, it melts things together, but the acrylics give it some body and strength once it re-hardens to provide a good grip on something porous and non-melty, like wood.
So, you squeeze out a thin line of the stuff and kinda smear it around so the channel back is coated. Don't go too thick - you don't really want to squeeze much of this stuff out when you press the binding into place, or it'll melt the top of the binding strip as well as the surface you're trying to attach to the body. Only do 4 or 5 inches at a time - the reactions are pretty fast. Press the binding in place, and tape it to hold.
That's a
high-tack tape commonly used for this purpose. Wicked sticky, but leaves no residue. You can sorta see where I've used the spacer blocks to apply force more evenly.
Once you've given the stuff time to do its work (they recommend 24 hours, but I cheated a bit here and there), you can peel back the tape and do the next strip. For the subsequent binding strips, I didn't use the Weld-On goop, I painted on straight acetone with an artist's brush. Here are a few shots after successive layers of binding...
Yeah, it's an oogy mess. But, fear not! We routed the depth of the binding channel a tad shallow so we could scrape the top of the sandwich down level with the body surface. All that molten plastic slop and strip edge variation goes away after scraping in later steps, so it looks like this...
Scraping is done with a machined and burred piece of spring steel. I won't bore you with the details; you can read about them
here.
In our next episode, we'll do something profoundly stupid!
Great work on the binding Cagey :headbang:
